Citus Data builds a column store for Postgres

Citus Data, a startup focused on turning PostgreSQL into a scale-out analytic engine, has developed a developed a columnar data store for the popular open source database. The company is open sourcing its extension for single-node environments, although it’s offering a distributed version as part of its CitusDB software. Citus already supported interactive SQL queries over Postgres (on which its technology is based), Hadoop and MongoDB, but columnar stores are faster for certain types of queries. Also, the compression features of the ORC file format that CitusDB uses can cut disk space by more than half.